The paper examines Malaysian taxpayers' perceptions of their current tax practitioner as well as the attributes of the ideal tax practitioners that they are looking for. The study shows that gender, age and education level are significantly correlated with the attributes of their ideal tax practitioners. Majority of females, in the age group over 31 years and with higher education level, tend to have high priority for `low risk with no fuss' as compared to males, with lower education level and age group below 31 years who display priority for `creative accounting, aggressive tax planning'. Besides, the most welcome kind of tax practitioner is one with `low risk with no fuss' and whom taxpayers categorize as an honest person. This is followed by `creative accounting, aggressive tax planning', where taxpayers seek for a tax practitioner who is familiar with the grey area, clever in tax minimizing and aware of the major areas that Inland Revenue Board (IRB) check on. The last is the `cautions minimization of tax', which is the least popular. Here, the taxpayers want the tax practitioner to help them minimize the tax, but at the same time also warn them against getting involved in tax planning schemes. The findings also indicate that most of the taxpayers are able to engage tax practitioners who have the attributes that they rate as the most important ones.

Taxation is one of the economic tools that the government uses to regulate the economic activities. The main objectives of implementing tax policies are to encourage economic growth through the granting of fiscal incentives to finance the various developmental programs, and to improve the undeveloped sectors of the society or such other social agendas. Following the announcement of 1999 budget and the subsequent release of Income Tax (Amendment) Act 2002, the official assessment system had been changed to the self-assessment of individual taxpayers, effective from 2004 in Malaysia.

This tax system was introduced to replace the system of checking and assessment, which was formerly undertaken by Inland Revenue Board (IRB), Malaysia. In other words, it reduces the workload of IRB to enable them to concentrate on areas, which have a high tax risk and potentially cause a significant loss of government revenue. Under the self-assessment system, individual taxpayers are legally held responsible for the accuracy of the tax return that they declared. Consequently, the cost burden of computing taxpayer's liability moved from IRB to individual taxpayers.

The burden of keeping appropriate income and expense records and computing their tax bases and liability led to considerable numbers of taxpayers seeking advice from tax practitioners. This is because tax practitioners would help taxpayers to reduce their perceptions on complexity in computing and legal uncertainty, save time or even exploit `grey areas' of the law. Thus, depending upon the motivations of the taxpayers, the technical knowledge and professional experience of tax practitioners can be used to improve compliance or undermine it.

Individual Taxpayers, Inland Revenue Board, IRB, Tax systems, Self-assessment system, Statistical Package for Social Sciences, SPSS, Ethical Attitudes of New Zealand Tax Practitioners, International Conference on Tax Administration, Tax policies.